ANDY BUCKLEY SAID, "Jesus Christ," and braked the Cadillac to a stop. I
looked up and there was the deer, perhaps a dozen yards away from us in
the middle of our lane of traffic. He was unquestionably a deer caught
in the headlights, but he didn't have that stunned look the expression
is intended to convey. He was lordly, and very much in command."C'mon," Andy said. "Move your ass, Mister Deer.""Move up on him," Mick said. "But slowly."'You don't want a freezer full of venison, huh?" Andy eased up on the
brake and allowed the car to creep forward. The deer let us get
surprisingly close before, with one great bound, he was off the road and
out of sight in the darkened fields at the roadside.WE'D COME NORTH on the Palisades Parkway, northwest on Route 17,
north-east on 209. We were on an unnumbered road when we stopped for
the deer, and a few miles farther we turned left onto the winding gravel
road that led to Mick Ballou's farm. It was past midnight when we left,
and close to two by the time we got there. There was no traffic, so we
could have gone faster, but Andy kept us a few miles an hour under the
speed limit, braked for yellow lights, and yielded at intersections.
Mick and I sat in back, Andy drove, and the miles passed in silence."You've been here before," Mick said, as the old two-story farmhouse
came into view."Twice.""Once after that business in Maspeth," he remembered. "You drove that
night, Andy.""I remember, Mick.""And we'd Tom Heaney with us as well. I feared we might lose Tom. He was
hurt bad, but scarcely made a sound. Well, he's from the North. They're
a closemouthed lot."He meant the North of Ireland."But you were here a second time? When was that?""A couple of years ago. We made a night of it, and you drove me up to
see the animals, and have a look at the place in daylight. And you sent
me home with a dozen eggs.""Now I remember. And I'll bet you never had a better egg.""They were good eggs.""Big yolks the color of a Spanish orange. It's a great economy, keeping
chickens and getting your own eggs. My best calculation is that those
eggs cost me twenty dollars.""Twenty dollars a dozen?""More like twenty dollars an egg. Though when herself cooks me a dish of
them, I'd swear it was worth that and more."Herself was Mrs. O'Gara, and she and her husband were the farm's
official owners. In the same fashion, there was somebody else's name on
the Cadillac's title and registration, and on the deed and license for
Grogan's Open House, the saloon he owned on the comer of Fiftieth and
Tenth. He had some real estate holdings around town, and some business
interests, but you wouldn't find his name on any official documents. He
owned, he'd told me, the clothes on his back, and if put to it he
couldn't even prove those were legally his. What you don't own, he'd
said, they can't easily take away from you.Andy parked alongside the farmhouse. He got out of the car and lit a
cigarette, lagging behind to smoke it while Mick and I climbed a few
steps to the back porch. There was a light on in the kitchen, and Mr.
O'Gara was waiting for us at the round oak table. Mick had phoned
earlier to warn O'Gara that we were coming. "You said not to wait up,"
he said now, "but I wanted to make sure you had everything you'd need. I
made a fresh pot of coffee.""Good man.""All's well here. Last week's rain did us no harm. The apples should be
good this year, and the pears even better.""The summer's heat was no harm, then.""None as wasn't mended," O'Gara said. "Thanks be to God. She's sleeping,
and I'll turn in now myself, if that's all right. But you've only to
shout for me if you need anything.""We're fine," Mick assured him. "We'll be out back, and we'll try not to
disturb you.""Sure, we're sound sleepers," O'Gara said. "Ye'd wake the dead before
ye'd wake us."O'Gara took his cup of coffee upstairs with him. Mick filled a thermos
with coffee, capped it, then found a bottle of Jameson in the cupboard
and topped up the silver flask he'd been nipping from all night. He
returned it to his hip pocket, got two six-packs of O'Keefe's Extra Old
Stock ale from the refrigerator, gave them to Andy, and grabbed up the
thermos jar and a coffee mug. We got back into the Cadillac and headed
farther up the drive, past the fenced chicken yard, past the hogpen,
past the barns, and into the old orchard. Andy parked the car, and Mick
told us to wait while he walked back to what looked like an old
fashioned outhouse straight out of Li'l Abner, but was evidently a tool
shed. He came back carrying a shovel.He picked a spot and took the first turn, sinking the shovel into the
earth, adding his weight to bury the blade to the hilt. Last week's rain
had done no harm. He bent, lifted, tossed a shovelful of earth aside.I uncapped the thermos and poured myself some coffee. Andy lit a
cigarette and cracked a can of ale. Mick went on digging. We took turns,
Mick and Andy and 1, opening a deep oblong hole in the earth alongside
the pear and apple orchard. There were a few cherry trees as well, Mick
said, but they were sour cherries, good only for pies, and it was easier
to let the birds have them than to go to the trouble of picking them,
taking into account that the birds would get most of them whatever you
did.I'd been wearing a light windbreaker, and Andy a leather jacket, but
we'd shucked them as we took our turns with the shovel. Mick hadn't been
wearing anything over his sport shirt. Cold didn't seem to bother him
much, or heat either.During Andy's second turn, Mick followed a sip of whiskey with a long
drink of ale and sighed deeply. "I should get out here more," he said.
"You'd need more than moonlight to see the full beauty of it, but you
can feel the peace of it, can't you?""Yes."He sniffed the wind. "You can smell it, too. Hogs and chickens. A rank
stench when you're close to it, but at this distance it's not so bad, is
it?""It's not bad at all.""It makes a change from automobile exhaust and cigarette smoke and all
the stinks you meet with in a city. Still, I might mind this more if I
smelled it every day. But if I smelled it every day I suppose I'd cease
to notice it.""They say that's how it works. Otherwise people couldn't live in towns
with paper mills.""Jesus, that's the worst smell in the world, a paper mill.""It's pretty bad. They say a tannery's even worse.""It must be all in the process," he said, "because the end product's
spared. Leather has a pleasant smell to it, and paper's got no smell at
all. And there's no smell kinder to the senses than bacon frying in a
pan, and doesn't it come out of the same hogpen that's even now
assaulting our nostrils? That reminds me.""Of what?""My gift to you the Christmas before last. A ham from one of my very own
hogs.""It was very generous.""And what could be a more suitable gift for a Jewish vegetarian?"He shook his head at the memory. "And what a gracious woman she is. She
thanked me so warmly that it was hours before it struck me what an
inappropriate gift I'd brought her. Did she cook it for you?"She would have, if I'd wanted, but why should Elaine cook something
she's not going to eat? I eat enough meat when I'm away from the house.
Home or away, though, I might have had trouble with that ham. The first
time Mick and I met, I was looking for a girl who'd disappeared. It
turned out she'd been killed by her lover, a young man who worked for
Mick. He'd disposed of her corpse by feeding it to the hogs. Mick,
outraged when he found out, had dispensed poetic justice, and the hogs
had dined a second time. The ham he'd brought us was from a different
generation of swine, and had no doubt been fattened on grain and table
scraps, but I was just as happy to give it to Jim Faber, whose enjoyment
of it was uncomplicated by a knowledge of its history."A friend of mine had it for Christmas," I said. "Said it was the best
ham he ever tasted.""Sweet and tender.""So he said."Andy Buckley threw down the shovel, climbed up out of the hole, and
drank most of a can of ale in a single long swallow. "Christ," he said,
"that's thirsty work.""Twenty-dollar eggs and thousand-dollar hams," Mick said. "It's a grand
career for a man, agriculture. However could a man fail at it?"I grabbed the shovel and went to work.I TOOK MY turn and Mick took his. Halfway through it he leaned on his
shovel and sighed. "I'll feel this tomorrow," he said. "All this work.
But it's a good feeling for all that.""Honest exercise.""It's little enough of it I get in the ordinary course of things. How
about yourself?""I do a lot of walking.""That's the best exercise of all, or so they say.""That and pushing yourself away from the table.""Ah, that's the hardest, and gets no easier with age.""Elaine goes to the gym," I said. "Three times a week. I tried, but it
bores me to death.""But you walk.""I walk."He dug out his flask, and moonlight glinted off the silver. He took a
drink and put it away, took up the shovel again. He said, "I should come
here more. I take long walks when I'm here, you know. And do chores,
though I suspect O'Gara has to do them over again once I've left. I've
no talent for farming.""But you enjoy being here.""I do, and yet I'm never here. And if I enjoy it so, why am I always
itching to get back to the city?""You miss the action," Andy suggested."Do I? I didn't miss it so much when I was with the brothers.""The monks," I said.He nodded. "The Thessalonian Brothers. In Staten Island, just a
ferryboat ride from Manhattan, but you'd think you were a world away.""When were you there last? It was just this spring, wasn't it?""The last two weeks of May. June, July, August, September. Four months
ago, close enough. Next time you'll have to come with me.""Yeah, right.""And why not?""Mick, I'm not even Catholic.""Who's to say what you are or aren't? You've come to Mass with me.""That's for twenty minutes, not two weeks. I'd feel out of place.""You wouldn't. It's a retreat. Have you never done a retreat?"I shook my head. "A friend of mine goes sometimes," I said."To the Thessalonians?""To the Zen Buddhists. They're not that far from here, now that Ithink of it. Is there a town near here called Livingston Manor?""Indeed there is, and 'tis not far at all.""Well, the monastery's near there. He's been three or four times.""Is he a Buddhist, then?""He was brought up Catholic, but he's been away from the church for
ages.""And so he goes to the Buddhists for retreat. Have I met him, this
friend of yours?""I don't think so. But he and his wife ate that ham you gave me.""And pronounced it good, I believe you said.""The best he ever tasted.""High praise from a Zen Buddhist. Ah, Jesus, it's a strange old world,
isn't it?" He clambered out of the hole. "Have one more go at it," he
said, handing the shovel to Andy. "I think it's good enough as it is,
but no harm if you even it up a bit."Andy took his turn. I was feeling a chill now. I picked up my
windbreaker from where I'd tossed it, put it on. The wind blew a cloud
in front of the moon, and we lost a little of our light. The cloud
passed and the moonlight came back. It was a waxing moon, and in a
couple of days it would be full.Gibbous-that's the word for the moon when there's more than half of it
showing. It's Elaine's word. Well, Webster's, I suppose, but I learned
it from her. And she was the one who told me that, if you fill a barrel
in Iowa with seawater, the moon will cause tides in that water. And that
blood's chemical makeup is very close to that of seawater, and the
moon's tidal pull works in our veins.Just some thoughts I had, under a gibbous moon ..."That'll do," Mick said, and Andy tossed the shovel and Mick gave him a
hand out of the hole, and Andy got a flashlight from the glove
compartment and aimed its beam down into the hole, and we all looked at
it and pronounced it acceptable. And then we went to the c

ar and Mick
sighed heavily and unlocked the trunk.For an instant I had the thought that it would be empty. There'd be the
spare, of course, and a jack and a lug wrench, and maybe an old blanket
and a couple of rags. But other than that it would be empty.Just a passing thought, blowing across my mind like the cloud across
moon. I didn't really expect the trunk to be empty.And of course it wasn't.